The best fighting games like Super Smash Bros Ultimate are Super Smash Bros, Super Smash Bros Melee and Rivals of Aether II. Below are 11, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to fighting costs you.
Filtering to fighting means you want a contest with a clear answer — you got it right or you did not. It is the right filter when what you liked was reading an opponent.
What you get: A skill ceiling you can actually see yourself climbing, and the shortest feedback loop in games.
What made Super Smash Bros Ultimate worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the fighting part of that answer, and only the fighting part.
The N64 original, and still the easiest one to hand four people.
The competitive one — faster, more technical, and a scene twenty-odd years deep.
The best current alternative, built by people who learned from Melee.
Free, team-focused, and unusually good at making two-on-two the default.
The most solid non-Nintendo platform fighter, and it plays properly.
Free, cross-platform, and easy to get anybody into.
The 3D arena cousin, where the stage and the furniture are the weapons.
Four players, one arrow each, and the fastest local matches there are.
If Smash was your on-ramp and you now want the genre proper, with a mode that teaches it.
For the party half only — physics comedy, zero skill required.
Six-player versus in a Saturn brawler, and far deeper than it looks.
A first few hours that can be discouraging alone. Fighting games are far better with someone at your level than against the internet.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Super Smash Bros Ultimate that are not fighting games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Super Smash Bros Ultimate — 12 picks, no genre filter.
Super Smash Bros. The N64 original, and still the easiest one to hand four people.
No. Super Smash Bros Ultimate released on the Nintendo Switch, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Much less than they were. Modern control schemes, rollback netcode and real single-player modes have changed the on-ramp completely in the last few years.
One opponent against one, or one against many. They share ancestry and almost nothing else — the picks below say which each one is.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Super Smash Bros Ultimate list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is fighting — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the fighting guide for where to start in the genre generally.